Hello there, friend!

Saying that goal-setting is important is pretty much a cliché, but what you don't hear as often is that setting a goal is only the beginning of goal-setting.

It still needs to be followed up with reflecting on the reasons and plan for achieving the goal. If you skip that, you undermine the benefits the goal can provide.

Reflecting on the reasons for setting the goal boosts your motivation. Try asking yourself and answering the Why? question as many times as you need to get to answers that feel in a way religious (i.e. reflecting your most fundamental values), imagining the result and its effects as vividly as you can. You'll know you're doing it right if you're getting hyped up.

When you're done with envisioning what you want to achieve, proceed to picture what you want to avoid – what's the scariest possible outcome that failing to reach the goal could lead to? Again, imagine this scenario as vividly as possible.

This might feel uncomfortable, but combining both approach and avoidance motives leads to the best outcomes. Especially when your motivation is low, reminding yourself of what you desperately want to avoid works better than thinking of your dreams.

As for planning, the right approach is to treat the plan as a hypothesis to be tested. By setting the goal, you've stabilized an image of a desired future, from which you now need to backtrack to the present. Along the way, you'll make your best guesses about the optimal intermediate steps and their requirements, getting more detailed only as you're getting closer to where you're at now. And yes, that means these estimates should be SMART (or at least ST, the MAR always felt somewhat redundant).

What you want to end up with are individual tasks clearly linked to the bigger projects, which in turn clearly tie into the overarching aims. This way, even the most mundane, boring tasks can tap into the motivational power of the big shiny goal.

When you do that, every task you work on will yield feedback for adjusting the plan – Do the actions produce the outcomes you expected? Are they as demanding (in time or any other resources) as you expected? Do you have the resources (time, skills, network, etc.) you need?

In addition, this feedback will provide further motivation, as you either see that you're getting closer to your goals, or that they are slipping away, both of which can be potent boosts for your drive.

Of course, every plan changes, so you don't want to spend too much effort on uncertain projections. This makes finding the right level of detail of your plan a bit of an art, but the clarity and motivation are very much worth it.

Reflection

Ugh, this post took sooo long and was such to write. It seems that when I’m writing to explain something I feel I already know, it’s in many ways more difficult than writing where I’m only just exploring my thoughts.

Probably the biggest struggle is in properly scoping the topic – since I know more about it, I also see more connections to adjacent ideas, and it took a long time to figure out what to focus on.

And since I will repost this on Linked In as well, I probably also feel more pressure – I want to be more concise and I feel much more like an impostor 😬

But all this is part of the journey. I decided to make writing my primary September focus regarding entrepreneurship, so hopefully the struggle will get gradually easier

As always, thanks so much for reading, hit reply to let me know any comments or suggestions, and I’ll “see” you next week!

Cheers

Chris